One of the things I thought was really neat about Starsector was the setting - everyone is just about making do, new stuff is locked behind ridiculous DRM nonsense that people guard bigly. And anyone without access to this has to use handed down stuff, or dig it out of a junk pile.
This is p. great as far as settings go, and imo it felt p. great to jive with this by leaning into it super hard and using whatever stuff could be found or recovered.
There were even skills available that allowed you to do that more effectively, and that was really apropos for the setting.
And so I spent
a ton of time just repeatedly doing this as my core gameplay, and building around it as various things happened or were found.
Really leaning into the mechanic that these ships might be trash, but I can support and deploy more of them explictly because of that.
It felt right.
So having those particular skills straight up
removed from the game in 095 was... Not really the best feeling I've ever had tbh.
Even more galling was the (excuse my language) absolute dogs dinner that was the new Derelict Contingent skill, which would have been the perfect place to put those particular abilities but instead had some really odd/unbalanced effect that runs into another issue I have.
It requires an officer to work.
This is something I can't get my head around. At all.
There are skills that do literally nothing unless you have an officer in a ship.
But there are no guaranteed ways of getting an officer (except for picking Kite as your starting companion), so these skills are dead weight or path blockers unless you've been lucky enough to find an officer, and lucky enough that the officer you find is actually useful to you in the first place.
And as if that wasn't quite odd enough, the entire deployment mechanics for your whole fleet now depend on how many officers you have compared to your opponent.
Your opponent will always have officers. Lots of them.
While you the player will only have the number of officers you have managed to find. It is not uncommon in my case for this number to be zero for a significant amount of time since I don't obsessively check comm directories on the few occaisions I visit the core, mostly because I'll forget about it.
Now, I'm not exactly great at combat in the first place. I have less than great physical dexterity because I used to be a riveter and whitefinger is a ***t of a thing.
But I've found the combat in 095 to be significantly harder than it was in 09.1 to the point that I just don't want to deal with it.
I can't quite identify what it is that's making things feel this different, but I suspect it's because I don't have nearly as many officers as the opponent and that's making them really aggressive, while my guys are really passive.
(This is all guesswork on my part - so ??)
I could restart on easy, that might be something to look at.
But this has a downside: It messes with the drop tables and makes things more common, which is the opposite of what I want.
So no matter what I do here I'm going to get unrewarding gameplay.
Honestly, I think this is one of the worst design descisions. Basing fundamental game mechanics off luck based events.
If this is staying in, there really does
need to be some way for the player to create officers. Raise crew from the ranks etc.
The skills themselves are not bad in a vacuum.
But the fact they are chained together in such a way that things you want are trapped behind things you either don't care about, or actively do not want is... Less than great.
Having to choose between two things you want equally because you need both to do the thing you want to do is particularly irritating, and just introduces a huge time-gate onto progression because now I'm literally
grindng xp to get more skills so I can wrap around to get the other half of the skill I missed before I can even start doing the main thing in the game I want to do - explore.
Ugh. The whole thing just makes me feel viscerally ungood just thinking about it...
Another thing that was something of an irritant was the rather restrictive limit for the number of colonies the player can control.
In 09.1 the player could ultimately control 4 planets directly, plus another 3 via governers for a total of 7. This was fine.
In 095 the player can control 2 planets directly, plus another 2 via governers for a total of 4. This, less so.
One of my obsessions is having colonies with access to all resources.
If you're super lucky you can do this with 2 planets. If you're unlucky you'll need 4.
The problem being that being unlucky is vastly more likley than being lucky, and by using your colonies in such a fashion you have just locked yourself out of ever doing any tech mining.
Which is somewhat annoying.
And also introduces/encourages metagame behaviour like doing all the tech mining first
then doing colonies, which is p. silly.
Imo, 5 is the absolute smallest number of colonies that the player can have and still have access to everything.
4 to cover resources plus 1 for tech mining.
If you can get all your resouces in fewer planets, then lucky you. More tech mining or less overheads.
Removing direct player control and doing it all via governers could be a way to look at.
It's not that big of a deal for this to be gated behind rng as it's not required.
And porting it all over to governers potentially unlocks the possibility of it being uncapped entirely, and letting expenses/overheads be the soft-cap.
All of this is a shame, because the story (what I've seen of it at any rate) is really nice.
Even if it does have some really dumb missions that are a bit tedious.
I super-miss being able to find a beat up junk ship and actually be able to use it almost as well as a shiny new ship because I've invested time and skills into being able to do that.
Feels like theres no point at all in doing this now. (D)amaged ships are always pure negative. Where previously they were negative, unless you deliberately built yourself around using them and then they became partially positive.
Which was fun
and thematically appropriate for the setting.
I made this as a joke, but it came true and I hurt my own feelings because I am literally a pratfall given form: